In last week’s column, I quoted an article in The Imaginative Conservative by my friend, the author John Medaille:
“This is not an election about the head, but about the heart, and at the heart of American politics is a burning rage. Rage that our livelihoods have been sacrificed to abstract economic theories; rage that our communities have been destroyed and scattered; rage that the ordinary citizen has been abandoned by our leaders, Republican or Democrat; rage that the concerns of all have been trumped by concerns of marginal groups, like the transgendered. But mostly, Americans feel rage that their interests have been ignored in favor the interests of the Rich, the powerful, the banker, the foreigner. And all of these concerns are summed up in one word: Globalization.”
I think Medaille is mostly spot-on in his description of that rage and about its causes, and that bit about the interests of everyone being “…trumped by concerns of marginal groups” reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to mention.
I happened to be working in San Francisco’s Castro District last June when U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Obergefell v. Hodges, legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states. I saw gay couples who’d been together for decades standing on the street, holding each other and crying.
It has struck me more than once that gay civil marriage is a far more radical change to our society than anything ever proposed or enacted by the Democratic Party in its history (more on that in a bit), and I mean “radical” in its descriptive, etymological sense – from the Latin “rad-“, meaning “root” (that is where the quintessential root vegetable, the radish, gets its name). As far as I can determine, there is no precedent in all of human history for treating gay marriage as legally the same as traditional marriage. And yet, within a few short years it went from a bohemian oddity to mainstream and protected by law.
Here’s the thing: According to Gallup, 3.8 percent of Americans – slightly less than 12 million people – identify as gay, lesbian or transgender; an even smaller percentage desire to actually partake in same-sex marriage.
In comparison, there are vastly larger numbers of people with far more basic and urgent needs. For example, according to Feeding America, an organization founded to “feed America’s hungry through a nationwide network of member food banks and engage our country in the fight to end hunger,” some 48 million Americans go to bed hungry on a regular basis, including over 15 million children.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 15 million Americans are either a. unemployed and looking for work, b. unemployed but have given up looking for work, or c. are working part-time despite desiring full-time work.
They need help, and while they have been failed by both political parties, I would argue that the more glaring fault rests with the Democratic Party, which was traditionally the party of the little guy – the powerless and vulnerable.
I’ve been working my way through Thomas Frank’s new book, “Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?”
Frank’s thesis is that beginning in the late 1960s, the Democratic Party gradually moved away from being the Party of the People and gradually became the party of educated elites – what he calls the “Professional Class” – doctors, lawyers, professors, scientists, technology entrepreneurs and programmers, and so on.
I agree with this assessment, and I think it was, at least in some respects, a result of liberalism’s success.
The late ’60s were perhaps the high water mark of the egalitarian ethic of the New Deal consensus. It was considered completely unremarkable that blue-collar workers and white-collar workers would live next door to each other, drive similar cars, and even enjoy the same kinds of recreation. The baby boomers had never known the economic world to be anything but like the world they grew up in, and considered the economic and class divide issues that had motivated their parents and grandparents to be already-solved problems of a bygone era.
The world the boomers grew up in was not a stroke of luck, but was the result of several policy approaches of their elders: high taxes on excessive wealth and incomes; a pro-labor bias in the regulatory regime; and a trade regime designed to protect the jobs and wages of ordinary American workers.
As that policy regime has unraveled, the result has been a reversion to the situation that obtained before the boomers were born: a yawning chasm between the lives of the rich and the rest, an end to defined benefit pensions and job security, and a growing anger in the people left behind, particularly in older people who remember the world as it was in the 1950s and 1960s.
John Steinbeck spoke of a similar anger in his masterpiece, “The Grapes of Wrath”:
“There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand.

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